At UbiCare, our mission is Making Us All Better—whether that “us” is the hospitals and patients we serve or our employees and the wider community. We invest in caring all year long because it’s good for business and it’s good to work with people who care enough to volunteer and invest in the community.

Volunteering is central to healthcareGiving back is a core part of our UbiCare culture. We believe in translating what we do for the healthcare market—providing access and information to help the patients of our hospital clients improve their health and their lives—to our community. We want nothing less than to change the world when it comes to stepping up and caring. And to achieve this, we have to give back.

All of us who work in healthcare have come to realize that real health comes down to the community. We’re all influenced by—and can influence—the people around us. We believe in supporting them in any way that we can.

Community is important all year, not just during the holidays

UbiCare has a corporate social responsibility (CSR) plan that includes volunteering on-site at a community or nonprofit organization at least quarterly, and often more than that. We also encourage staff to suggest the causes they want to give back to. It helps the rest of us get more excited about a volunteering project when someone we work with is passionate about it.

We designated 2015 as the Year of the Essentials, and focused our volunteer efforts on food, education and clothing. We harvested fruits and vegetables for low-income Boston residents at Revision Urban Farm and packed meals for homebound and critically ill people at Community Servings. We visited a local middle school to talk with students about career preparation and ran career-focused activities through the Partners for Youth with Disabilities’ Young Entrepreneurs Project. We sorted baby clothes at Cradles to Crayons’ Giving Factory. We hosted a blood drive and invited the entire Brewery Complex to participate.

The important thing here is that it’s never a surprise when we announce our next CSR initiative, which we’ve dubbed the “UbiCares” program. It’s already a big part of who we are and what our employees want us to be. Plus, it tells the world and our staff that this is a core value for us and not just lip service.